Taiwan protests to WHO for China bird flu listing

Taipei, Mar 10: Taiwan protested to the World Health Organisation (WHO) today for treating the self-ruled island as part of China by listing it as a bird flu infected area.

''Taiwan is not a bird flu infected area nor a part of China,'' Foreign Minister James Huang told reporters, saying the government had demanded the WHO fix the mistake immediately.

China views Taiwan as a breakaway province and has threatened to attack the democratic, self-ruled island of 23 million people if it pushes for formal statehood. The two split at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.

Taiwan has yet to experience an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus, which has killed 96 people worldwide since 2003, 10 of them in China.

The WHO covers Taiwan as part of China on a map on its Web site which only mentions China's bird flu cases.

Taiwan, whose official title is the Republic of China was ejected from the United Nations in 1971 and replaced by the communist People's Republic.

The island had also demanded that Web search company Google Inc.

stop calling it a 'province of China' on its Google Maps service.

Google later removed that reference.

Reuters